The present invention relates to an archiving system in an enterprise management system in which a lifecycle of a business object stored by the enterprise management system is computed at the time the business object is created and updated when/if the business object is accessed. During archiving, the enterprise management system may compare a current date to the lifecycle data present in the business object.
Enterprise management systems are well known. FIG. 1 is a block diagram of a computer system 100 that may operate as an enterprise management system. The system 100 may include one or more terminals 110 and severs 120 provided in communication with each other via a network 130. The number of terminals 110, number of servers 120 and topology of the network 130 is immaterial to the present discussion unless noted otherwise herein. The system 100 may operate as an enterprise management system in which various application programs interoperate to manage business functions of a firm, typically a company.
FIG. 1 also illustrates an exemplary application architecture common to enterprise management systems. The enterprise management system may include one or more transaction applications 150 that support discrete business transactions of the company. The transaction application 150 typically generates and manages its own transaction data 155, which is stored in a database. Exemplary transaction applications may include:                customer relations management (CRM) applications, which manage customer-facing operations such as product marketing and product sales,        supply chain management (SCM) applications, which manage vendor-facing operations such as materials ordering,        product lifecycle management, and        human resources management.Other applications can be included in an enterprise management system. In each application, individual enterprise transactions are represented by business objects. “Business objects” are data objects maintained by the enterprise management system that include business logic, data identifying process steps to be performed to complete a respective transaction, and business data, the data collected during performance of the transaction.        
An enterprise management system also may include analytical applications 160, which perform analyses of transactional data and generate analytical reports that can be used to measure enterprise performance. A variety of analytical applications 160 also are available, each of which commonly generates and maintains its own data set 165. As the analytical application 160 executes its operations, it also may generate business objects which include business logic defining the analytical operation being performed and the data gathered during performance of the analytical operation.
The enterprise management system 100 also may include an archive system 170, which is a management utility that reviews stored business objects of the enterprise management system and identifies business objects that no longer need to be stored by the respective applications. If a business object meets criteria for archiving, the business object may be removed from the data store 155, 165 of the respective application and stored in an archive data store 175 or may be deleted from the system altogether (represented by trash).
When determining whether a business object can be archived, common solutions perform a preprocessing step that searches among the data stores for all obsolete data objects. Preprocessing involves reviewing each data object present in the data store, determining whether criteria for archiving are met and, when the criteria are met, setting a flag associated with the data object to indicate the respective object should be archived. Data migration, the act of moving or deleting data objects, can occur only after the preprocessing step concludes.
As can be appreciated, large enterprises can generate perhaps ten thousand business objects per day. Thus, the system's data stores 155, 165 may store possibly millions of business objects for which the archiving criteria may be unique. The number of data objects present in a storage layer of the enterprise management system causes the system to incur a high cost to perform the archiving process. Resources allocated to the archiving process, which is an administrative process within the system, cannot be allocated to perform transaction or analytical operations.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for an archiving process in an enterprise management system that incurs lower cost than previously known approaches.